The author’s attempt to portray the church as the true people of God is evident on every page of the book of Revelation. He depicts the followers of Christ as the eschatological people of Israel. The prophetic corpus is John’s main vehicle for asserting that his communities are experiencing the end times as God’s people. Thus, for the purpose of furthering the argument that the messages to Smyrna and Philadelphia bear witness to the churches in conflict over Jewish identity, we must now turn to the